The move (back) to touch screens has been somewhat clumsy for Nokia.

Having abandoned them after the ill-fated 7710 and standardised on hardware and d-pad control with its best selling S60 phones and keyboarded communicators, we now find the industry moving back to full-face touch screens.

The cheap and cheerful 5800 XpressMusic has been very successful, introducing us all to the old S60 interface but with touch support tacked on top. It wasn’t elegant, in the same way as the iPhone OS is elegant, but it did work and the extra screen real estate (640 by 360 pixels is the new standard for Nokia) was welcomed in all applications, but especially for mapping and web browsing.

And now we have the N97, with essentially the same core software and interface as the 5800 but with a quality bump all round on the hardware front. Does the bump justify the price (almost twice as much, SIM-free)?

Specs & info
Price: £500
Operating system: Symbian OS 9.4
Processor: 434MHz
Memory: 128MB RAM, 128MB flash, 32GB mass memory flash
Dimensions: 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm
Weight: 150g
Display size: 3.5”
Display resolution: 640 by 360
Expansion: 1 x microSD

The large touch screen is obvious, but jaws drop when people see the way the screen slides up and to the side, with a trapezoid action that screams fragility yet which is actually very robust, being made of alloy and metal. Revealed is a miniature qwerty keyboard, rather squeezed in size because of the inclusion of a d-pad (for N-Gage gaming, apparently).

Typing is strictly a two thumbs affair and with the space bar skewed off to one side, you’ll have to get used to spacing your text with your right thumb.

Still, it’s faster than a virtual on-screen keyboard and lets you type while seeing the full display, which is a big improvement on the 5800’s arrangement, but doesn’t come close to the best qwertys such as that on HTC’s Touch Pro2.

Elsewhere in the hardware, there’s the ‘include everything’ mentality. There’s the E90 and E71’s huge 1500mAh battery, the N79’s FM transmitter, the loud speakers from the 5800 XpressMusic, the N96’s keylock toggle and built in ‘mass memory’ flash disk (now bumped up to a huge 32GB, amazingly), plus the N85’s 5 megapixel camera with dual LED flash.

That there’s a GPS built in should be taken for granted, but even this is enhanced, with a digital compass, so that Nokia Maps can orient all on-screen maps to match the way the N97 is being held. This works but you have to ‘calibrate’ the compass every time you use it by walking a figure of eight, which is a pain.

The software is also an amalgamation of everything that’s gone before, including every multimedia gadget and productivity aid from every other S60 phone, with the result that this is a device that can do just about anything.

The main unique addition for the N97, over and above the ‘touch’ version of S60 seen on the 5800, is a ‘live widget’ home screen, with bundled examples including Facebook and Accuweather. These mini-views of installed full-screen widgets present live information on the home screen, complementing the built-in email Inbox and Calendar views.

The system’s powerful and configurable, though the widgets are based on Web and are RAM hungry – with everything in place, you’re down to 46MB of free RAM, enough for normal use but power users are going to hit limits when doing heavy multitasking.

Under the hood, there’s a processor that’s 20% faster than the 5800’s, helping to keep everything snappy, even when streaming or playing (downloaded) BBC iPlayer programmes.

Web is faster too, aided by more intelligent automatic use of full-screen mode and by ‘kinetic’ (iPhone-like) scrolling, where you can flick to set a long web page moving up or down.

Minor omissions from the retail package include a case and TV out cable – apparently people rarely used this, and it’s still available as an add-on if you really need it. There’s no built-in stylus, the N97 is finger-touch and keyboard driven, but Nokia do include a corded stub stylus if you really, really feel the need.

Essential Verdict
Performance: 8/10
Design: 9/10
Features: 9/10
Value for Money: 7/10

Overall score: 8/10

Written by Steve Litchfield. Originally published in Smartphone Essentials.

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